A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (17 page)

I saw Jeremy in 1973, with Robbie Benson and Glynnis O’Connor. Set in New York, it detailed the relationship between music nerd Jeremy and new-girl-at-school Susan. Jeremy sees her and pines for her. The movie perfectly depicted the yearnings and possibilities of high school lust and connection. Rewatching the movie, I am struck by the dialogue, which is exactly right for characters I identified with. The sexual tension mounts and the two find themselves alone on a rainy afternoon at Susan’s apartment. The music swells, Jeremy removes his glasses, fumbles with her bra strap. Susan takes matters in hand and removes her sweater and unhooks her bra. His hands are on her back, he kisses her nose, and nature takes its course. What struck me even more, in retrospect, came after the lovemaking, when Susan brushes her hair and takes a bath with what I noted as “post-coital mooniness.”

In a taxi afterward, the conversation captured the after-the-fact uncertainty and anxiety that adults also feel in these moments: he asks if something is bothering her, and she replies she just feels “wispy.”

She later tells Jeremy how she could still feel him “all over my body.”

Heady stuff. Beyond the seminude scene, the characters’ rampant emotions also connected with me, as we were all lonely teens reaching out, yearning for a special someone, ready to kiss and stroke and have something “serious,” as Susan tells her father about her relationship with Jeremy.

As a budding writer, I also delighted in the written word. Once, I was at a paperback display with a friend and I idly flipped through The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, published in 1971. With blind luck, my eye fell on the book’s hottest scene, in which, somewhat like Susan and Jeremy, fallen woman Sarah keeps the action rolling with stuffy male character Charles. As found on page 313 of the hard cover edition, in Fowles’ mock-Victorian prose, Charles reaches into Sarah’s and finds “forbidden female flesh, silken and swollen contours.” Well! That fired my teen imagination.

I nudged my friend and said, “Hey, look at this.” I showed him the steamy passage.

“
Wallach!” he exclaimed.

I would not read the full passage or the whole book for over thirty years. Only in 2005 did I realize that, when it comes to “forbidden female flesh,” we guys sometimes react in unintended ways. While Tom Sawyer and Jeremy managed their erotic interludes well, poor Charles, well ... I winced at his reaction: he vomited next to Sarah’s head. Yech.

By 1975 my movie viewing had advanced to seeing the erotic spoof Flesh Gordon with friends. The plot involved the evil Emperor Wang of the planet Porno and his diabolical “sex ray.” I can’t remember any sex scenes, but bits of the script stayed with me, as in the song lyric about Emperor Wang, “Without him the planet Porno would be oh so forlorno.” Paradise Lost it’s not, but the line scans well and has a clever ring to it—why else would I remember it almost thirty-seven years later?

One last film stands out, at the end of an arc of my growing awareness of the often-messy flip side of sexuality. I saw
Shampoo
—starring Warren Beatty as horndog hairdresser George, with Julie Christie as Jackie and Goldie Hawn as Jill, as two of his objects of lust—when it debuted in 1975. Something about the movie haunted me. I gazed on Julie Christie’s slinky, revealing gowns and saw Goldie Hawn in panties and a baby-doll nightgown, and the movie sizzles with raunchy talk, but the shock came elsewhere. I couldn’t identify it. Upon another viewing at the age of fifty-one, I got it.
Shampoo
trembles with female emotions, as George beguiles and then betrays one woman after another. Jackie and Jill’s raw feelings of wanting and hurting scream off the screen.

The emotional climax comes when Jill stumbles upon George and Jackie having sex on a kitchen floor. Seeing them through a window, an enraged Jill throws a chair through the window, screams “You bastard!” and runs past them, while Jackie sits disconsolately on the floor. Jill’s pain is terrible to watch, and we wince at her line to George: “I’ll know you’re incapable of love and that will help me.”

Frantic George veers back to Jackie and pleads, as men through the ages have pleaded, for her to take him back, crying, “I’ll make you happy, I swear to God I will.”

Jackie falls to her knees, distraught. “It’s too late,” she says.

The women were sexy and the language was risqué, but what I truly remember about
Shampoo
is, “you bastard” and “it’s too late.” Tom and Becky grew into Jeremy and Susan and crashed into George and Jill and Jackie.

Nothing like Jeremy and Susan’s rainy-day interlude ever happened with that Baptist chick in a halter top. She made sure of that. All these images remained cerebral, untested theories. My own sentimental education remained maddeningly pure. Had the opportunity to act on impulses arisen, I don’t know how I would have reacted.

Actually, I do know.

First, some background. My brother and I traveled to New York to see our father in the summers of 1972 and 1974, and I went on my own in December 1974 and the summer of 1975. Our father relentlessly sought to remake my brother and me from untutored “cowboys” into Brooks Brothers-clad, opera-appreciating Upper East Side gentlemen. He expounded for hours on our pathetic educational, social and cultural state.

In August, 1974, Dad and his wife (he remarried in 1962) took us to Miami Beach, where his parents were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. There, in the lobby of the Montmartre hotel, he decided that the perfect moment had arrived to give us the big sex talk. As we sat in the lobby, Cooper and I listened, and he gave us his views of the world of the sophisticated man. His tour of sexuality’s far horizons touched on brothels, nudist camps, STDs, masturbation, the Oedipal complex, the value of backseat quickies and much more. My ears perked up when he advised us “to have a sexual encounter with an older woman to teach us all about what women like.”

(I recounted this monologue in my journal and, after several hundred words, wrote, “This may be an incredibly understated news flash, but Nixon resigned yesterday.”)

In the summer of 1975 I returned to New York alone for college interviews and to take short-story and photography classes at the New School. Cooper had had more than enough of our father’s “you uncultured Texas hicks” attitude and stayed in Mission. But the bright lights of the city beckoned and so, wary as I was of my father’s bullying, I headed to New York and hoped for the best.

Dad decided to make his Montmartre theories into my Manhattan reality. In his typical manner, he steered me to the toys and games section of Bloomingdale’s to announce his big plan: he had arranged for me to spend the night with the thirty-five-year-old “physical therapist” of an antiques dealer pal of his. He wanted to extend his control into the most intimate, sensitive parts of my life.

I wrote,

The offer tempted me but I quickly declined. Whatever the appeal of fantasies made flesh, I absolutely would not allow my father to be my pimp. I refused to give him any say in this matter. His wife told me the woman was very nice, but I dug in my Texas boot heels and would not reconsider. To this day I have no doubts about the rightness of my decision—I was seventeen and horny, but I also had my self-respect and emotional independence to consider. I would rather keep my virginity than lose my sense of self to my father’s overbearing demand to shape my life according to his values. (He also told me, “Van, they’ll eat you alive at Princeton if you don’t know opera.”) For this and other reasons, the summer was a disaster.

So my grand chance to act on impulses came and went, unconsummated. After I returned to Texas, this brush with erotic reality left me exhausted and bored with sexy imagery. In August 1975, while checking out the University of Texas at Austin, I saw
Last Tango in Paris
. The film did nothing for me; I don’t remember a single moment of it and have no interest in seeing it again.

My relationship with Venus became ever more exasperating for both of us. We saw, yes,
Shampoo
, at El Centro Mall in McAllen and I wrote that “we were thoroughly mad at each other, just like the good old days.” I had already seen the movie in New York, so I knew what was coming. We held hands until the scene when Goldie Hawn’s Jill throws the chair through the window. As I reported, I turned to Venus and whispered, “There she goes again, always over-reacting!” Venus, really steamed, withdrew her hand for the rest of the flick.

It had come to this: the Baptist chick in the halter top watched George, Jill and Jackie with me, and I left the theater feeling just like George in
Shampoo’s
last scene: alone in the world.

I carry an updated mental list of post-teen sexy images. The older I get, the more I prefer not so much specific scenes in movies or books, but rather a suggestive mood, an appeal to my imagination. The way I describe it, the women on MTV are raunchy, the women on Country Music Television are alluring. Lately, I’ve become an enthusiastic fan of
The Good Wife
on TV, where I gaze in hushed awe at star Julianna Margulies as she shifts from business-suit prim and professional to volcanically aroused in most episodes. Forget Kim Kardashian and her ilk—give me Julianna in her power suit.

Finally, to give the devil his due, as an adult I found that some of my father’s ideas from the Nixon Summer of 1974 weren’t half-bad after all. I just had to explore them in my own sweet time, even if I had to wait thirty or so years. Which one? A hint: car-nal knowledge.

In the previous chapter, I wrote about how books and especially movies shaped my perceptions of life from an early age. Like other American kids in the ’60s, I soaked up rugged images from John Wayne movies at the historic Border Theater in Mission, Texas. Then I started noticing the curvaceous Bond Girls as fantasies.

As an adult, the movies of Woody Allen showed me an urban, Jewish take on life. My dating career always had an urban comedy air to it, with scenes of Passover-seder angst that could have been lifted from Allen’s works. Actresses such as Melanie Mayron, Barbara Hershey (AKA Herzstein, with a Jewish father) and Amy Irving helped define the look and spark I yearned for in a Jewish woman.

From decades of attentive film-going, I distilled a list of the sexiest Jewish movies and stars. Granted, some of the actresses aren’t Jewish, nor are the roles, but that’s not going to interfere with a good idea. This idea came to me when I was thinking about “Best of” movie lists. A well-circulated list of the top fifty Jewish movies ranges from heartwarming to harrowing, Fiddler on the Roof to Schindler’s List. Yet nobody has ever analyzed Jewish cinema through the filter I prefer: the Sexiest Jewish Movies. That’s a big cultural omission, since sensual zest has permeated Jewish life at least since the writing of “The Song of Songs.”

I decided to fill this gap in cinematic analysis.

What are Jewish movies? I define a Jewish movie as one where the characters identify as Jewish and take that identity seriously. Such movies may or may not deal with “religion” as such, but the identity colors characters’ lives and history. That eliminates movies where characters reek with self-loathing and treat their identity as a burden, or where Jewishness functions merely as a shorthand way to declare, “I’m hip! I’m edgy! I’m neurotic!” My Hall of Shame category here deals with that nonsense.

What makes films erotic? Eye candy counts—getting to view hot Jewish bodies—but I also like the way characters act, their personalities, their seductiveness and ability to draw me into a situation. The sexiest body part, as we all know, is between your ears, so if a movie hits me there, it qualifies. Explicitness doesn’t always work; Lena Olin in a bowler hat in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
dazzles me but I am repelled by Kate Winslet as a clothes-shedding death-camp guard in
The Reader
.

Obviously, this list reflects the views of a fifty-something straight male. I mostly list films plucked from distant memory, although I’ve seen several recently and rewatched two of them to check whether my first impressions were accurate (they were). Besides favorite films, I’ve also included several Lifetime Achievement Awards to honor those performers with an outstanding body of work that I’ve enjoyed for decades. So, the envelopes please ....

Jeremy is a Robbie Benson coming-of-age film. I’ve already mentioned that I saw it as a teen when it debuted in 1974, when I was the same age as the characters. He’s a nerd from New York, and dancer/love interest Susan is a creative soul who’s new in town from Detroit. He’s Jewish, she’s not, and how he got the last name of Jones is addressed in their conversations. Jeremy’s religious background is part of the movie’s tapestry, just as coming to terms with my Jewish background was becoming a major issue for me at the time. The aching sincerity and fantasy fulfillment of Jeremy and Susan going all the way gave the movie a power that remained strong when I watched it again, thirty-five years after it debuted.

Girlfriends: Before thirtysomething, Melanie Mayron starred in this 1981 film about a struggling Jewish photographer named Susan Weinblatt pursuing love and a career in New York. At the time I was a struggling Jewish writer pursuing love and a career in New York with about as much success. “Susan” chases men, cries, talks to Rabbi Gold—played by Eli Wallach (no relation, except in the general Member of the Tribe sense)—and in one too-brief scene exposes her ripe young Yiddish rump for the camera. I adored her and her stunning mop of dark curly hair. Even the act of watching the movie intersected with my personal life; I saw it with one of the first women I ever dated steadily in New York, Adina. The movie is not on DVD and, as far as I can tell, was only available briefly on VHS. Who’s keeping the rights locked up? The reissue would be a hit.